Robin and I decided to spend another day at the Temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu. The sky was clearer today and there would be a good light for photographing the beautiful colourful reliefs in the temple. We took an arabeya up to the ticket office and bought our tickets for the temple. The ticket clerk this morning was a friendly man who we had got to know over the past couple of weeks and he always had time for a chat, so we stopped for a while to pass the time of day with him before taking the back road to Medinet Habu, past the sites of several long-gone temples, alongside the massive mudbrick walls and through the impressive towers of the temple gateway.

The West Bank temples are usually referred to as mortuary temples, dedicated to the funerary cult of the deceased pharaoh and usually carried on their rites after the death of the king, at least until the next big mortuary temple was established. But Medinet Habu was more than a mortuary temple or a cult temple, it was a town and administrative centre in use throughout most of the new Kingdom and into the Graeco-Roman Period. At times when Egypt was rocked by the threat of marauding Libyans or torn by civil war, the town became a fortress and much of the local population lived within its protective walls. Later the Coptic Christians took it over and built their church and dwellings within the courts of Rameses. Its ancient Egyptian title, the ‘Mansion of Millions of Years of Rameses III’, evokes the spirit of this important temple complex. Of all the temples in Egypt, it is at Medinet Habu that I can most easily peel away the dusty layers of the centuries and imagine the rites and festivals that once took place here, the gods who lived here and the people who worked in and cared for the place.

Having concentrated on tombs so far on this visit, I wanted to have a look at the Osiris suite in the south wing, to see how the images of the god here related to Osiris as god of the dead in the tombs. I had seen in the royal tombs how the king passed with the sun god on his long hazardous journey to be reborn in the Afterlife, to dwell forever with the gods. Here in the temple we see Osiris in a slightly different aspect, as ‘Ruler of Eternity’. There are a whole series of rooms which are loosely called the Osiris Complex, though several other deities are portrayed here too. In an outer chamber Rameses III is shown sitting inside the sacred ished tree, receiving his jubilees from Amun-Re, while Thoth writes his name on the leaves of the tree. I love this image, which can also be seen on the front of the first pylon. I was particularly interested in two small rooms towards the rear of the suite which seemed to depict the king’s reception into the Netherworld and to portray his expectations of eternal life there. One scene, a cameo from the ‘Book of the Dead’ shows the King arriving in the ‘Fields of Iaru’, which is his final destination in the Afterlife, once he has passed through the trials of death depicted in his tomb. In ‘Iaru’ the deceased must work the land, which is always plentiful, just like an idealised picture of Egypt itself. I would imagine that the King would have many servants to do the actual labouring (his ushabtis), but the symbolism on the walls is self-explanatory. He can be seen ploughing the fields with oxen, cutting and harvesting grain and appealing to the Nile god Hapy for a good inundation. On the opposite wall the King brings offerings and recites prayers to Osiris asking to be rewarded for his trials in arriving in this celestial land of plenty. In the inner room there are several small but complicated scenes from the ‘Book of the Dead’ which represent the King’s eventual success in his transformation into ‘an Osiris’. Many of the chambers are very dark, the walls blackened with age.

What we know about Osiris as god of the dead, comes from the funerary texts. I had seen many portrayals of Osiris in the king’s tombs, as well as the nobles tombs. He is always shown in tombs as a mummified figure, sometimes seated on a throne. To begin with, from the Old Kingdom, Osiris was probably known as a fertility god, but in later times his renown was as a god of the Afterlife who has denied death to live an everlasting life in eternity. As a resurrected deity he is ruler of the Afterlife and it is with Osiris that the deceased king becomes merged in Egyptian theology. Osiris was also considered an aspect of the sun god, or the sun god’s counterpart in the Afterlife, at least in the New Kingdom, and he represented for the king, a salvation and a resurrection for his everlasting life. Here in the Osiris Complex at Medinet Habu I could see the continuation of the Osiris mythology beyond the tomb.

I spent a long time here making notes to follow up later and taking what photographs I could of the beautiful scenes, though it was quite dark and the small rooms were unlit. Of course I didn’t really know very much about what I was looking at before going away and doing a lot of reading. But this Osiris suite has become one of my favourite parts of Habu Temple and I always make a point of visiting these chambers since then.

On Sunday my two friends and I spent a whole day at Medinet Habu Temple – my favourite West Bank site which was so often overlooked by tourists in favour of the Ramesseum or Deir el-Bahri. Many tour groups spend only a morning on the West Bank. Time is necessarily limited on these tours and the morning trip usually consists of a quick dash around The Valley of the Kings (and possibly Queens), Hatshepsut’s Temple and if they’re lucky, one or two nobles’ tombs. It is only those people who stay in Luxor and are able to return again and again to the West Bank that are able to see more of these wonderful monuments. Even so, Medinet Habu wasn’t well known. This was my fourth time in Luxor and I still considered that I hadn’t seen a fraction of the sites.

The temple at Medinet Habu is a huge complex of stone towers and pylons and massive mudbrick ramparts, once a place of great importance, not only as the mortuary temple of Rameses III during Dynasty XX but as an earlier place of worship as well as a fortress and administrative centre for Thebes which spanned several dynasties.

The distinctive eastern gateway overlooks the inside of the temple grounds. The high towers are typical of Egyptian defences from early times, but this gate is unusual in that it has broad windows which overlook the main entrance to the temple through the first pylon. The interior of the high gate is reached by a modern staircase on the south side of the tower and leads to the second storey. The floors have long gone and we could look up at the whole extent of the inside of the tower at the scenes which show the king at leisure, surrounded by young women. One inscription tells us that these were ‘The King’s children’ but other scenes may be of the royal harem. It was to these rooms that Rameses III must have retired when in residence at Medinet Habu. From the first floor windows there was a fabulous view over the whole temple.

As we were all studying together, we decided to spend the whole day at the temple and look at the reliefs in greater detail. I had developed a great interest in the ‘God’s Wives of Amun’, or ‘Divine Adoratrices’, king’s daughters of the Third Intermediate Period who were Amun’s earthly consorts and lived unmarried in ceremonial splendour. These women were representatives of royal power, visible symbols of Theban loyalty to the king who lived in the north. In the forecourt of the temple grounds there are four chapels which are both mausoleums and mortuary shrines, belonging to Amenirdis I, Nitocris, Shepenwepet II and Mehytenweskhet .

In the north-east corner of the courtyard there is a small temple which is a mixture of both the earliest and latest construction at Medinet Habu. This temple was already present when Rameses III began work at the site in the 20th Dynasty, having been built by Hatshepsut in the mid-18th Dynasty and extended by her successor Tuthmosis III, but archaeologists have found traces of an even older construction here. This small temple was being restored, the three shines at the rear were closed, but we could go through it into the more modern Roman parts.

Back into the forecourt we were faced with the First Pylon of the Rameses Temple, a massive structure that had the usual gigantic depictions of the king smiting his enemy captives before the gods, a symbolic representation I was now used to seeing in most Egyptian temples. There are actually three pylon gateways, the inner two with a portico and court before them, two hypostyle halls and numerous side chambers, all in an excellent state of preservation. The colour on the reliefs is still quite vivid in places, due to the fact that parts of the monument was later re-used as a Christian church and the reliefs were painted over, keeping them in good condition. The first court, which adjoins the king’s palace, mostly depicts the military exploits of the king, but also the daily temple rituals, with the king censing, libating and offering to the gods. It was the priests of course, who performed these rituals daily in the absence of the king. The gods had to be fed, dressed and cared for each day and after the process was completed the offerings would be distributed to the priests and temple staff. In this way the temple was able to provide divine offerings and pay its staff at the same time, a highly practical arrangement.

Following the general layout of Egyptian temples the floor slopes gradually upwards towards the sanctuary, the home of the god at the back of the temple, which would have been low and dark when in use. A ramp of shallow steps leads out of the first court and through the gate of the second pylon into the second court. This is the festival hall which shows in great detail, the religious festivals of the gods Min and Sokar that were celebrated here at Medinet Habu. The square pillars in the second court have many depictions of gods and goddesses and because we were learning to read hieroglyphs we were able to work our way around and work out their names. The Portico leads through the third pylon and looking up to the door soffit we could see the beautifully painted cartouches of Rameses III. Once past the Portico we entered the inner parts of the temple where the resident gods and goddesses had their shrines. Only properly purified people, i.e. the king or certain members of the priesthood, were allowed access to the temple proper. When it was in use the temple and its hypostyle halls would have been very dark and lit only from the roof or high windows. Today there is little left of the main temple apart from the surrounding suites of rooms and the stumpy bases of the hypostyle columns.

Going back out through the first pylon, we walked around the outside walls of the building where many large reliefs document the life of Rameses III. One especially beautiful relief on the back of the first pylon on the south side of the temple shows the king hunting in the marshes in pursuit of game. Here we could see the bull hunt, with the king balancing himself in his chariot and wielding a long spear. Below him his escorts march with bow and arrows towards the birds and fish in the lake in front of them. Also on the southern side are the remains of the restored palace area, containing the throne room with the dais still in situ and parts of the king’s living quarters which include a bathroom and stone bath, or shower, complete with drains – this was fascinating.

The rest of the space inside the mudbrick enclosure walls was occupied with neatly planned rows of offices and private houses which have now mostly vanished, except for one house, that of the scribe, Butehamun, but remains show that Medinet Habu was more than just a temple, it was a whole town which survived long after the reign of Rameses III.

After seven hours in the temple, working our way through the various courts and rooms we were all very tired. The guard who had followed us around for the first hour or so had given up on us long ago. We had gone out for a short lunch break at the Rameses Cafe opposite and now we decided we would stay on the West Bank and have dinner there too. This led to several hilarious games of an Egyptian form of Ludo afterwards, so it was around 10.00pm by the time we got back to the ferry to cross the river. Tonight the crossing was even scarier. It was the opening night of Aida at Deir el-Bahri and security was especially tight. We still had the police launch with its big guns to escort the ferry but there was also a police helicopter with searchlights flying overhead. We had also noticed that there were lines of soldiers camping on top of the Theban Mountain and soldiers on the ferry too. It felt like being in a war zone, but I guess they were just being cautious with the president and other bigwigs here today.

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